CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Ierima, Alin |
|---|---|
| Title | At the Edge of Peace: Can Transitional Justice Disarm Terrorism? |
| Summary | This thesis is meant to address a critical gap in the literature at the intersection of transitional justice, conflict and terrorism studies, by examining how transitional justice mechanisms (TJMs) influence terrorism in transitional contexts. While previous research had explored TJMs in relation to state repression, conflict recurrence and human rights, the impact of TJMs on non-state violent actors, particularly terrorist groups, remains largely unexplored. Building on the frameworks of deterrence, bargaining and grievance theories, this study investigates whether amnesties, trials and truth commissions affect terrorism levels, and under what conditions. For this purpose, the study employs a large-N quantitative study of 1970-2020, and negative binomial regressions models are used to evaluate both raw terrorism counts and terrorism weighted by severity. The findings reveal that truth commissions are robustly associated with short-term reductions in terrorist attacks, while trials appear to exert a longer-term, soft deterrent effect on terrorism frequency, regardless of state capacity. Trials in strong states are also weakly associated with short-term decreases in both frequency and severity of terrorism, but also long-term influences on the severity of attacks. Amnesties show limited and inconsistent effects. Overall, the results lend initial evidence that TJMs can influence terrorism, but their effects are highly contingent on timing, mechanism type and institutional context. |
| Supervisor | Bogaards Matthijs |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/ierima_alin.pdf |
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